The SES Conference and Expo has jumped to a great start here in Toronto! This is my first year attending the SES Conference with Evan; it has been an exciting day learning about trends, techniques and tips from the SEO Guru’s themselves!

Below I have listed my favorite highlights and tips I have learned from Day 1.

Is Retargeting/Remarketing Right for You?

“Research shows that as many as 90% of the people who visit a website leave without completing any action that online marketers intend them to take, such as making a purchase.” Chris Sukornyk the CEO of Chango Inc, a Retargeting platform talked about the most effective ways for website owners to become engaging with their audience.

7 Types of Effective Retargeting, which consist of on-site and off-site engagements with your audience. Examples include targeting individuals based on the specific products viewed, actions taken or actions not taken, or even targeting individual’s based on searches they conducted on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The “leaky” SEM Marketing Funnel – which includes visitors clicking on your competitors ad through your website, or visitors searching through SEO websites and going through review sites instead of going directly to your website.

5% of Internet use is researching which gives limited amount of time for marketing online due to the lack of amount of searches being conducted.

Dan Taylor from Google Display Network went more in depth to talk about “delivering the right ad at the right time”. He believes that audience and contextual marketing should be a great layer for your marketing efforts. A great example he used for retargeting is Expedia.com; a prospect searches for an Alaska Cruise, does not purchase the package and leaves the site. Next time they visit the site an advertisement will pop-up with “Our New Great Deals On Alaska Cruises! – Click here to learn more” sign, motivating them to make the purchase.

SEO 101

Considering my lack of knowledge pertaining to SEO and optimizing a website Bruce Clay, president of Bruce Clay Inc. did a tremendous job presenting a ton of useful information for the non-techies like myself!

Use clarification words for your content to help the crawlers understand what your website is about and what you are trying to rank for. Write in a natural way for your audience (do not use language your audience would not use themselves or else they will have difficulties finding you through search engines).

To get your site spidered more often you should add new content as frequently as possible, the recommended amount is on a daily bases. Bruce gave an example of a very popular website CNN which gets spidered every 2 minutes due to the amount of changes the website undergoes, they have one million articles added every month!

What is natural ranking? Placing the keyword blank amount of times, but not to the extent to be considered as a spammer. Top 50 sites were analyzed and they all used the keyword every 7 words in the content. Which brings me to a story the audience was told about a camping trip. Two friends decided to go camping; while they were making bbq a bear approached them. The two friends decided to start running, now as the first guy running you don’t have to be an Olympic racer; you just have to beat the guy behind you – that is SEO! Beating your competitors not the search engines.

Analytics 101

This was a very informative and energetic presentation done by Matt Bailey, SES Advisory Board and President of Site Logic Marketing. Notifying the audience that “big numbers lie” especially in analytics was noted at the start of the presentation; furthermore Matt provided in-depth information how to work Google Analytics to your favor.

Big numbers lie because they are a set of data – data cannot be good or bad, it is just classified as data. However, if you do not ask good questions about the numbers you receive from your analytics you cannot go in-depth to figure out which data is good from the bad, and use the analytics to figure out more information.

When data is complex, understanding is easy. First thing you need to do is list the goals of your website. The first goal should be how to make money; you have to understand the value of your leads. The second goal contains segments, which are the intentions people have when they are on your site.

3 C’s of Analytics:Context – create a segmentContrast – contracts and compare your different segments/personas
Comparison – by comparing you can create a story from the analytics data to help you get more leads!

Did you know the Segmentation feature on Google Analytics are the hardest features to use? However, it is the most important because this is the set of information that will differ from the monthly data you copy and paste into your spreadsheet. Using Segmentation will provide you with more complex data however, it will allow you to understand your visitors more and understand how to get them to make that purchase. It also helps distinguish which pages on your site rank better for your keywords so you know where to work harder.

More Data = More Comparison

More Comparison = More Relationships

More Relationships = More Answers

Which brings you to more leads!

I’m looking forward to Day 2 of the SES Conference, don’t miss the second post!

I’ve been waiting for the tips about Analytics. I learned a lot from this. I guess I have to learn more about segmentation. Segmentation looks relevant to understand more your visitors. Thanks for this update!

I think retargeting is needed for those who haven’t established their target market yet. Sometimes it’s pretty tricky. I agree with retargeting and keep on doing it until you could find the right target. Then once you find it, stick with it.

We remarketed a few months ago and it actually worked for our company. The thing is, if you have established a market and it’s doing good, stick with it. Remarketing is only good for unestablished (or established but has gone down) markets.

I think remarketing would be a good idea. That is if you haven’t established your niche yet. And yes they pointed out some good points on remarketing/retargeting. I think it was one of the most interesting topics.

We were thinking of retargeting for our company. I think I know have a better idea on it. I don’t know if we should go for it, though, since our target marketing is currently good. But not that strong.

I love how they pointed out retargeting/remarketing. A lot of companies would really appreciate everything they talked about during that point. The discussion made me open my eyes to the possibilities. And yes, probably we would retarget soon.

SEO and Analytics were two good points for me. I think SEO and analytics seems to simple that people overlook them. With their discussion, it was like an eye opener that it those two shouldn’t be taken for granted.

When a company needs retargeting, it should be done carefully (and fast… but not really). Make sure you are targeting the right market or you’ll find yourself going back to your old market. Just study the trends and your sales numbers.

I appreciate how they arranged this conference to be so insightful. It was made in such a way that marketing officers of different companies would have a proper flow of understanding fully what online marketing is all about. Applause for this event!

From what I saw on your other posts, It looks like SES conference had really presented a really good take on online marketing. It’s good to learn from the experts how we can effectively use online marketing for the success of our business. Thanks for sharing this Evan!